Monday, October 10, 2016

Zürich, Switzerland. All around the world, thousands of users are accessing and editing the new online encyclopedia for the 21st Century, Infogalactic, which styles itself the Planetary Knowledge Core™. Conceived as a next-generation replacement for Wikipedia, the troubled online encyclopedia, Infogalactic is a dynamic fork of Wikipedia that is designed to supplant its predecessor by addressing the problems of bias, vandalism, harassment, abuse, and inaccuracy that have plagued the Wikimedia Foundation’s flagship project for years.

“Every notable public figure who has a page devoted to them knows very well what an inaccurate nightmare Wikipedia is,” said Vox Day, Lead Designer of Infogalactic, a computer game designer and bestselling philosopher. “The page about me there has had everything from my place of birth to the number of times I’ve been married wrong. And that’s not even counting the outright abuse, such as when Wikipedians replaced the entire page with a definition of a sexually-transmitted disease or with a string of obscenities.”

Infogalactic plans to solve the structural problems of a community-edited online encyclopedia through objectivity, proven game design principles, and a sophisticated series of algorithms. Currently in an operational Phase One, the Planetary Knowledge Core has a five-phase Roadmap that its founders claim will eliminate edit warring, significantly improve accuracy, neutralize vandalism and other forms of griefing, and render all forms of political bias on the part of administrators and editors irrelevant.

“The primary challenge facing any online wiki is the individual editor’s incentive to impose his perspective on everyone else,” said Renegade, the Operations Director of Infogalactic, who, as per the organization’s pro-anonymity policy, is known only by his handle. “Most people who contribute to an online knowledge base do so because they want to have their say, but in the end there can be only one perspective that is enforced by the site’s administrators. Infogalactic has solved that problem by embracing true objectivity and eliminating the enforcement incentive by moving from a centralized, vertically-stacked orientation to a decentralized, horizontally-distributed model.”

Infogalactic’s anti-bias architecture will permit users to select their preferred perspective and automatically see the version of the subject page that is closest to it based on a series of algorithms utilizing three variables, Relativity, Reliability, and Notability. This means a supporter of Hillary Clinton will see a different version of the current Donald Trump page than a Donald Trump supporter will, as both users will see the version of the page that was most recently edited by editors with perspective ratings similar to his own.

Thanks to the 172 Original Galaxians who made this possible. Special thanks to Rifleman and Renegade, who have both put in an incredible amount of time and effort. Thanks to Crew and Veritas, who did not hesitate to throw down and take responsibility for two vital areas moving forward. Thanks to Robert, the first Techstar, who provided invaluable advice. Thanks to the scores of early supporters, who have demonstrated that this is going to be a viable community effort.
And as for everyone else, now you know. Get on board, spread the word, and take back the cultural high ground of social media!

Was impressed how the criteria for submissions is clear and designed to make it very difficult to slip in distortion.

This applies to those on the Right as well as the usual suspects. The point is not to play the game their way, but to play the game correctly. If you're a Galaxian creating or editing a page, play it straight every single time. Don't shade things. Don't omit things. Don't play defense lawyer in the criticism section.

"...as both users will see the version of the page that was most recently edited by editors with perspective ratings similar to his own."

This is a bigger quagmire than the mess Wikipedia is dealing with. You can't satisfy everyone, and it's useless to try. Slicing and dicing the data to come up with three versions of the truth is leading us farther down the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

Lots more work remains to do, but GG is no longer falsely described as a harassment campaign:

GamerGate is the name given to an ongoing “movement” that began in August 2014 with concerns about the corruption of video game journalism after a series of coordinated attacks on the gaming community by game journalists. In a period of two weeks,4chan purged the majority of its 45 moderators for being sympathetic to gamers, a dozen simultaneous “Gamers are Dead” articles were published on the same day by Ars Technica, Gamasutra, The Guardian, The Financial Post, Jezebel, and other sites. The #gamergate hash tag was popularized by actor Adam Baldwin and was adopted as a title for the loosely affiliated group by adherents as well as opponents.

> "Infogalactic’s anti-bias architecture will permit users to select their preferred perspective and automatically see the version of the subject page that is closest to it"

Yay, Internet safe spaces for everyone!I can't wait for the neocon manchildren to enter their own information bubble. Google, Facebook and Twitter are so good at this that an Internet encyclopedia equivalent was sorely needed./sarcasm

Anyone else having trouble logging in? I access the site via the link in my invitation email, then after entering my temporary password and setting my new password, I get "Database errorA database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software."

VD wrote:If the commenters post their desired content... might it find its way to Infogalactic?

Do it here

Cool! So that means that anybody in the world- or at least anybody who reads VP- can suggest and write new content, even if they aren't editors themselves. It might not become incorporated but at least it will be considered. Trolls of course would have to get the highly-refined VP treatment. Hi Wikipedia, bye Wikipedia.

The best shivs hurt because they are true. You just know that SJWs are reading this, furious at what Infogalactic implies... and then get triggered-within-a-trigger, inception style, when they read that.

This is exactly the fragmenting of "news" I've expected. Soon, different people will choose fundamentally different foundations for use in populating their gestalt. Confirmation bias will be everything.

Don't get me wrong. This is a good thing, and a natural consequence of the postmodernism of the Dominant Left, who rejected any and all reality in favor of theit monotonous delusion.

VD wrote:Lots more work remains to do, but GG is no longer falsely described as a harassment campaign:

Thanks. Much better.

VD wrote:So send us a more accurate rewrite. We can't do every single thing ourselves.

Fair enough. Probably should have done that to begin with. Here is one possible take, (though I admit this one flawed too, as it was created by the community: http://thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewiki/index.php?title=GamerGate

The GG article alone will probably be a good example for the perspective filters once they are implemented given the wide range of opinions and divisions over it.

This is “objectivity” as algorithmically appeasing subjectivity. Only individuals can be objective--logically focus on relevant facts without allowing irrelevancies to skew judgment. Linking one biased perspective to another ain’t it. The project may be fine; the description is false.

You can't reach a goal of "objectivity" by an algorithm that matches non-objective, false perspective with non-objective, false perspective; judging only by the blogger's own description, it's a way of skirting the requirements of objectivity. Nor is what is the nature and means of objectivity a trivial or minor question. Insults about how "unwise" or "pedantic" I am for raising the issue don't answer me.

Hoo-boy, this is big. I've always wanted an All-Volunteer Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything, and predicted it (under that name) in 1994. Wikipedia seemed like just the thing, until its lefty peccadilloes started making me nuts. I've wondered for years now if somebody would ever fork it. I've never bothered to write for Wikipedia because I don't want some fool just nuking my contribution because it made him itch somewhere. Several of my friends had their bios disappeared for not being sufficiently notable, despite most of them having significant (if sometimes highly vertical) fame.

I still can't get into IG half the time (traffic!) but the impression I've gotten after my first few visits is: **This needs a book.** Maybe it's too early, but something of modest size that explained in detail what it is, why it's being created, and how to contribute would be spectacularly useful.

Good luck with it, and *illigitimati non carborundum.* The *carborundum* has gotten pretty rough online in recent years.

So I've had this idea for a while, really for about 6 years or so. After joining Infogalactic yesterday, it looks like the roadmap in phase two starts to head in the direction I was thinking of with it's "fact", "context" and "opinion" sections. I wrote the following years ago, and think there may be a kernel of an idea here you might consider adding to the roadmap. Without further ado:

WhykipediaHave a wiki that allows people to say why things are (instead of what they are).Wikipedia and every other encyclopedia focuses on what a thing is. The reason for this is obvious: encyclopedias are supposed to be repositories of knowledge. Given a commonly accepted definition of knowledge being "justified true belief," describing why something is is often subject to speculation and mere ideas.

Having a wiki that focuses on the why is within the realm of the possible. There would often often be competing mutually exclusive ideas about the why, so the wiki would have to allow for that.

I imagine for each subject that the page would be mostly text-based information, like Wikipedia is today. But there would also be an interactive map showing in a branch-like format all the reasons why. Every map would take the form of a chain of reasons. Substantiation of reasons would play a big role, and type of substantiation would be indicated. Each node in the branch would be a summary of a reason but would be clickable and would expand to show detailed substantiation (an essay, a formula, a poll, or a claim of any of these, etc)

For ease of reading, reasons can be marked with certain properties. For example: subjective, objective, substantiated by: {reason, empirical evidence, individual experience, math, etc}, strong or weak, valid or invalid, type of statement: {well known argument, doctrine, theory, hypothesis, law of nature, law of man, equation}

Subjects are theoretically unlimited, but things like restaurant reviews are really outside the scope of the project.

ProblemsReasons and substantiations across all subjects are certainly redundant and it seems best to reduce double input by sharing these things amongst subjects. Two problems with this: 1) how to find the reason and/or substantiation and 2) what if someone changes a substantiation that is linked to multiple reasons, and this change makes it invalid with respect to some of the linked reasons.

Subjects branch/leaf out from a general subject, how is this done without rewriting an encyclopedia? For example the subject the blueness of the sky is a leaf off the general subject of sky. Definition and searchability are to be considered.